careers

Convention Idea: SPECIFIC Career Tracks

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Continuing my series on ways conventions can provide more career-oriented events for attendees, let's take a look at specific career tracks.  You can find earlier posts on the subject here and here.

I've mentioned career tracks earlier, but want to focus on the idea of the specific career track.

Most implementations I've seen of this take several panels/workshops related to a particular career or skill, and ensure they take place in one location at different times.  This allows people to attend all or most of them, since they don't conflict with each other, and are easy to locate since they're in the same location.

This doesn't work for every event, and is probably best targeted for ones specific audience: a voice acting and/or animation track for an anime con, a writing track for a Science Fiction convention, etc.  Only large conventions could have the time, space, and need to do a large amount of tracks.

Targeting career tracks brings in several advantages and possible techniques:
* You reach a specific audience of interest, and maximize attendance while minimizing cost.
* You can "rank" the events/workshops/panels by experience of attendees – thus do the more introductory panels earlier and the more "senior" panels later.  This allows people to attend events fitting their experience level, or attend events in order, learning things from the basics to deeper knowledge.
* You minimize cleanup and equipment for events – you'll at least know what cleanup to expect, and can leave media equipment in the same room.
* You can "re use" guests/panelists and allow them to speak on multiple panels, leveraging their knowledge better.
* This can easily become a yearly event at the convention, constantly improved and tweaked.
* It's a reputation-builder – you show specific career support.

Specific career tracks are something I'd pay attention to convention-wise.  I think for many conventions they're just the prescription to maximize panels that people will want to attend, and build something long-term to educate attendees.

– Steven Savage

What Is a Geeky Job?

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So I talk about Geeky jobs and being a professional geek and so forth.  Geek 2.0, Modern Literati, etc.

So what do I mean by this?  In short, what do I consider a geeky job?  Admittedly I never put it into words much, but with the one year anniversary of the blog, I figured I should try.

First of all, to me, Geeks (and Fans, etc.) are people who get worked up over something.  They're passionate and intimately involved in what they do.  Drives and motivations may differ, but they get INTO things.

Secondly, Geeks, Fans, Nerds, etc. get into doing things with what they like.  They're not (always) passive consumers.  They do websites, fanfic, fanart, role-play, fantasy sports, conventions and more.  They are involved.

Third, Geeks are usually about the information – from sports statistics to new recipes to the latest anime.  They thus tend to take to communications technologies quicker for obvious reasons.

So a  Geek is:
* Passionate
* Involved
* Informational

So to me a Geeky job is one that:
* You are passionate about.  There's a visceral element to your involvement.
* You are involved in creating and doing stuff you care about.
* You communicate with others, grow, exchange information about what you do.

A geeky job varies from person to person for obvious reasons – which is the point.  It's what gets you going, involves you, and drives you to communicate.

Granted there are jobs that are likely geekier than others because they involve passion, involvement, and information (say, manga artist or social media programmer).  There are some that are doubtlessly non-geeky for most of the population.  But a lot of it is personal.

Also a job may be very geeky even if its not in a geeky area, or is part of something less than geeky.  Working IT is geeky almost everywhere, even if its in a very dull area – which I can confess to experiencing first hand, when I worked in 'boring' industries, on some wonderfully geeky jobs as a programmer.

Passionate, involved, and informational.  Those are your markets for a Geeky job – and you can look to see what you can do that fulfill those three traits in your career.  If you have that, you have a geeky job.

– Steven Savage